We Can Not Afford Social/Political Amnesia

I was a kid in the 1960's and 1970's, who grew up in Niagara Falls. The air in the city was often horrible because of the businesses (factories) along the Niagara River that spewed unregulated smoke and gasses into the air; Lake Erie was almost completely dead (this is not hyperbole--it was a dead lake filled with toxins and pollutants); then a neighborhood near the industrial area of the city (and not far from the city's drinking supply) began to discover toxins bubbling up from the ground--and "Love Canal" became a household word; the Love Canal neighborhood was boarded up, and neighbors were relocated because of the pollutants that for a generation or more were buried in an abandoned canal that was built over as a neighborhood. 

To this day, toxins from the big pollutants (unregulated "free enterprises") are still seeping through the rock strata underpinning the city, into the creeks and streams that flow into the Niagara River.  

Across the State and the country, major cities began to use the word "smog" to name the unbreathable air that was produced by the combination of factories and unregulated car exhaust from the cars that were produced by auto industries that simply chose not to improve exhaust output, though they had the technology to do so.  Businesses were putting food products on the market that contained unhealthy chemicals and "preservatives," and were using insecticides on crops that were likewise making people sick... just as the cigarette industry was pushing their product with all kinds of claims about cigarette safety....    

We can not afford a rewriting of history, or a moral amnesia, that somehow convinces people today that businesses and industries are "too regulated," and that somehow, if they were allowed to be totally unfettered enterprises, they would somehow do what is best for us all.  We have the FDA for many, hard fought reasons. We have the EPA and environmental regulations (and still not enough) for many hard-fought reasons.  We have OSHA... for many hard-fought reasons.  Today's political struggle is one that is being pushed by moneyed interests that see the opportunity of an era, to roll back so many things, not for the interest of the average American, but for the bottom-line profit of the already extremely wealthy.    
  
You still can not eat fish from Lake Ontario without worry that you are ingesting mercury and other toxins from pollution that was put into the environment by unregulated businesses decades ago!  You still must wonder about the water that surrounds you in the Great Lakes for the very same reason.  Along Lake Ontario, several major land-fills grow daily, filled with everything from the waste products of nuclear testing in the 1940's, to the potentially anthrax-contaminate desk of network news broadcaster, to the endless industrial waste that has become one of the key "imports" of one of the few big money-making businesses in the region--- a giant waste processing company.  This is not getting better, and if we follow the political agenda today that is calling for "deregulation" to somehow "fix" society and the economy, we will instead be reversing what meager gains our society made over the past half century or more in saving the eco-system in which we live from unregulated capitalism.